Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which may well be the most dystopian film ever made. Set in the near future, a mere dozen years from now, in a Los Angeles gone as cold and rainy as 19th-century London, it takes the notion that life is a Darwinian struggle and runs with it, shooting as it goes. Amplifying the dark vision of Philip K. Dick, whose short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? underlies it, Blade Runner ventures that anyone who can afford the trip has abandoned Earth for some distant colony after a catastrophic but undiscussed world war; with a few exceptions, the home planet is now inhabited only by the infirm and the poor—and by a handful of androids slated to die very soon, their life spans limited to four years, and now seeking their maker to ask for a life-extending retooling.

The hero of the book is a bitter bounty hunter named Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. No, that’s not quite right: Deckard is no hero, just a man who is visibly weary of life and has no particular reason to keep on living. Instead, the real hero of the piece is Roy Batty, leader of the “skin jobs” who have thus far eluded their police pursuers and are now back on terra firma. Their quest is brave but in vain, and most of them suffer at Deckard’s hands. I hope that it is no spoiler to say that in the end Roy, a sort of postmodern Prometheus, dies, as all living things and all things that aspire to life must die. His final words: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

To trust Rutger Hauer, who played Roy and whose nicely told memoir All Those Moments has recently been published, the leader of the android pack had a more florid good-bye slated. But, Hauer writes, “Everybody dies before they’re ready, Roy Batty included, and so I cut thirty of his lines.” The result: that spare, elegant ending, even if, as Hauer writes, the bit with the doves had to be improved in postproduction, and even if the screenwriter may have screamed a little.

It’s a love-hate sort of film. Ford is rumored not to like it much; as Hauer writes, “I never hear Harrison talk about Blade Runner—it’s almost like it doesn’t exist to him.” The film, as continuity geeks well know, is full of plot holes: Where is the sixth skin job? How does Pris’s hair go from wet to dry to wet again? If Hannibal Chew’s laboratory is so killingly cold, why does water drip from the ceiling? Spotting such mistakes—or could they have been deliberately seeded mysteries—is a parlor game as rewarding as the one with Kevin Bacon. (Let’s see: Harrison Ford was in The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones, who was in Batman Forever with Val Kilmer, who was in Heat with Robert De Niro, who was in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon; or, Kevin Bacon was in Footloose with Sarah Jessica Parker, who was in Honeymoon in Vegas with Nicolas Cage, who was in The Rock with Sean Connery, who was in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Harrison Ford; or, more parsimoniously, Kevin Bacon was in Sleepers with Brad Pitt, who was in The Devil’s Own with Harrison Ford. . . .)

Slips and the occasional grumbling review (New York Times: “has neither strong characters nor a strong story”) aside, Scott’s movie has held up to the passage of a quarter-century well. See it again—and this time cheer for poor Roy Batty.